


Bright Fading Stars

by sleeperservice



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Love Confessions, M/M, Resurrection, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 14:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13320309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleeperservice/pseuds/sleeperservice
Summary: The worst thing to happen to someone one loves beyond all hope should never happen twice.Mikael had been watching Nino to his left, to see if he was going to win the battle and feed him the puck, but out of the corner of his eye he saw something happening on the right side of the net. The puck hadn't been shot there. It was where Mikko had set himself up to wait for redirections or rebounds. The whistle blew. It looked like there was a man down.





	Bright Fading Stars

Mikael had been watching Nino to his left, to see if he was going to win the battle and feed him the puck, but out of the corner of his eye he saw something happening on the right side of the net. The puck hadn't been shot there. It was where Mikko had set himself up to wait for redirections or rebounds. The whistle blew. It looked like there was a man down. He cautiously skated over there to see what was going on. There were a couple of Senators standing around and looking sick. Mikael saw one of the officials kneeling next to a twitching body in a Wild uniform. It was Mikko, lying there on his back with his limbs immobile except for a rapidly twitching left arm. His eyes were frozen open and unblinking.

Their trainer was coming out on the ice, not fast enough for Mikael's satisfaction. Everything seemed to be slowed down. He crouched next to the official.

"Mikko, can you hear me?" he asked. He didn't expect a reply.

"Yes. I'm going to be all right, Mikke, don't worry about me. Just play the third period strong, like I know you can," Mikko said, very faintly. His lips didn't appear to move and his voice sounded metallic and artificial.

"Did he take a hit?" Mikael asked the official.

"No. He just fell to the ice, like this."

The trainer and some staff came and moved Mikko off the ice on a stretcher. There would be no third period of that game, nor the remainder of the second. The game was postponed. The team was in shock and awaiting word of Mikko's condition, which did not come.

Word never came, either the night of the game, or for the days after. He was alive, his teammates were told, but unable to receive visitors. The hot rumor was that he had probably had a stroke, but that information had not been shared with them either. Everyone was worried from teammates down to the fans, and the few local hockey beat writers hadn't been able to dig up much information. Mikko had essentially disappeared. No one was handling his phone calls or texts, as they went unanswered. His family was not answering any questions. As more and more days went by, his teammates were wracked by worry.

  


Mikael received an odd phone call a few weeks after the incident. He normally screened calls from numbers he didn't know but it was coming from a 763 area code, so it had to be from a local business or person. He had the strangest feeling it was something he needed to pick up.

"Mikke? Are you alone?" The voice on the other end sounded a lot like Mikko, but this was most definitely not Mikko's phone.

"Yes, but...Mikko, is that you?"

"It is. I don't have my phone anymore. Will you please come see me as soon as possible? I have the address, you can come right in, just don't tell anyone you're coming or where it is. Please, please, promise me."

"I promise, I'll be there as soon as possible, just me. Are you all right?"

Mikko was silent for a few seconds. "I don't know. Just come." He gave Mikael the address and hung up.

The address led Mikael not to a hospital, nor to a care facility, but to some industrial park in Plymouth somewhere off Highway 55. The suite number he was given belonged to some generic biomedical firm in the midst of a bunch of other generic biomedical firms. The office he entered was beige and devoid of personality, without even a dying or rubber houseplant. The woman sitting behind the lone desk also looked like she was beige and devoid of personality.

She stood up and walked around the desk, offering her right hand to shake. "I'm Katariina Mäki, senior researcher. You must be Mikael Granlund. I'd recognize that hair anywhere."

"I was afraid you'd say that. Where's Mikko?"

"He's here behind this door. But I need to tell you some things before you enter that are vitally important for you to know. Can you sign this nondisclosure agreement beforehand?" She handed him a bunch of sheets of paper on a clipboard with an attached pen.

"What for?" Mikael looked at the agreement, with language about trade secrets and technology transfer, things he didn't know enough to interpret or care enough to leak. "Did you do some sort of experimental treatment on him?"

"I can't tell you until you sign it."

Mikael reluctantly took the pen and signed the last page of the agreement, and handed the clipboard back to her. "There we go. Tell me everything."

"First off, I'll let you know what our company does. We're a robotics company, primarily, and we're doing some cutting-edge research in regards to artificial intelligence. Along the way, we've also gone into some research on human consciousness and the artificial reproduction of it."

Mikael blankly nodded. "All right, but how is this relevant?"

"Mr. Koivu was one of our first investors when we were a startup back in 2006. Definitely not one of our major investors, of course, but someone who was intrigued by what we were doing and kept up a keen interest in our research, and who could be reliably counted on to serve as a subject on a yearly basis."

"Ah, so...kind of like that MRI thing that can see brain function and all that, you stuck him in that every summer?"

"That and a bit more. Android prototyping and the like. He has been so incredibly helpful to the business, especially now."

"I'm glad. But still, what's the secret you need me to protect?"

"We've been working, as I've said, on artificially reproducing human consciousness in digital space, in android bodies that will work like their human originals. It did not take us very long to achieve some proof of concept, but the big thing—the complete copying and transfer—we were unable to do. It was unethical; we can't have two copies of the same consciousness running around. Which has claim to the real person? Both? None? So, some of our employees and a select few of our research subjects signed an agreement. We have our minds on file and android copies of our bodies waiting. But to test the concept, one of us...our bodies of flesh need to expire first before being transferred over. Suicide for this purpose would also be unethical, especially if our hypothesis proved to be tragically incorrect."

Mikael felt he knew where this was going. He didn't want to be right. "But then one of you died."

"Yes. In July 2014, about two weeks after having a, in layman's terms, mental recording taken, one of our non-employee research subjects was in an accident at his summer cottage that eventually proved fatal to his organic body. We were able to upload his consciousness recordings to the android body at around the same time the organic body expired, to provide a continuity of identity. The experiment was successful, and remained successful until approximately two weeks ago, when we were finally alerted to some challenges. We have been prepared for them, of course, but we all thought we had more time."

"It was Mikko who died, wasn't it? Back in 2014?"

She nodded. "Yes, he is our first, and only, successful subject. But the incident in the game confirmed that things have been going wrong for him for a while. The digital mind cannot keep up with the stimuli of its environment, nor with the simulation of organic emotions. It's...glitching, for lack of a better word. Unable to control its limbs or vary its responses to human factors."

"So that's why it looks like he doesn't care out there. Why he has no anger in his game, or anything else. Why he hadn't been able to even score for so long. It's why it feels like he doesn't care about us anymore."

"The consciousness in the android has Mr. Koivu's memories, what he had recorded that summer before his organic body expired; and he knows he is supposed to take care of the team, to guide you and calm you, but it's getting too hard."

His memories. What they luckily had recorded right before the tragedy that ended his life, back in the summer of 2014. Mikko's smile at greeting him, his joking around with the youngsters on the national team, his concern for sick children; all subroutines loaded into this artificial thing to fool the organic beings around him. Mikael felt sick. Almost four years, and he had never figured it out, and he should have known. The flat stare of Mikko's metallic blue eyes that almost never blinked, the masklike pale face, the warm yet strangely textured skin that always felt like he was just a little bit under the weather...all of it manufactured somewhere, all of it false.

"I understand it's a bit much for you right now," Ms. Mäki said. "The reason Mr. Koivu wants to see you is because we have come to the conclusion that the body he currently inhabits needs to be shut down. We have copied his mind, and will copy it again once the body is transported back to Finland. The body will be put into sleep mode until the new body is ready, and when he awakens once more he will be in an improved, more responsive body. But this is only if this works. We cannot guarantee it. He wanted some time with you before the shutdown."

"I understand. I'll see him now, if that's all right."

She opened the door to the adjoining room, and Mikael walked through it. The room he entered was also spare and unornamented, save for a few pieces of computer equipment he couldn't identify and a large metal table in the center of the room. Mikko was sitting on the table. He was wearing nothing but a hospital gown.

"Oh, Mikke, I am so glad you could come." Mikko smiled. "Come over here and sit next to me for a while. I know the surface is cold, but you'll warm it up soon."

Mikael sat next to him. He wanted Mikko to hold him, to embrace him like he did in the goal celebrations, to tell him how proud he was of him and how happy he was that he was doing so well, like he always had. Like the live one did, and like this dead thing had for the past four seasons. He had played with the robot longer than he had with the human.

"You look sad," Mikko—or this robot that was Mikko—said. "Is it about me?"

"Of course it is. You aren't...you. Or the one I thought you were. And now you're going away, too."

"You were never meant to find out. This body was supposed to last longer, the mind in it was supposed to last longer. It wasn't meant to slip away in front of you or anyone."

"How can you even talk like that? How could you fool us?" Mikael was crying; thick, inconvenient tears dripped down his cheeks.

"What I remember, and it's me, it's always me, just...I'm Mikko, just a different version, all right? And I, I could never, I...the man I was, the flesh I wore, he loved you. I love you. We...I...would never want to hurt you."

Mikko loved him. The words Mikael had wanted to hear for years, the words he had longed to say to him in return, said by an android and with no good way for him to reply. "You don't have desires or emotions. That roboticist said."

"I have the memories of emotions. I don't have the chemicals that would make them in my brain, the way they used to come. I know what I used to feel. What they programmed was how I show those old emotions, and when, and I just can't keep up with the new stimuli anymore. The new body should be better at that. It should blink more often, too. That was a definite error in the programming."

"Will you still look like you?"

"I don't know. The new body is still under construction. I have no idea what it is supposed to look like, but in everything I have requested I have wanted it to look like me. This last body, it was intended to look like me, but they erred on the side of caution during the construction because it was supposed to be stored and it turned out to look like me, but about a decade or more older."

"Oh, Mikko. I just thought you were having a rough summer." Mikael gave him a wan smile.

"It was a rough summer! When I woke up like this, with those two weeks gone, I was...I guess I was surprised, or I felt surprised. My heart would have been racing if I had still had one. But I suppose overwhelming fear may be one of the things they edited out of me. Because I don't feel it now, and I suppose I should. I don't know what's going to happen to me next. That's why I wanted to see you again. There's going to be one last recording of me taken when I get back home, and I hope it works so I remember this meeting." Mikko grasped Mikael's hands in his. His hands were still warm and damp-feeling.

The roboticist had lied, or hadn't worded things correctly. Mikko did want things; he wanted his friend to be with him, he loved, he wanted connection. Those didn't seem like hollow words. He impulsively kissed Mikko, feeling cool dry lips with none of the softness one would normally find. Mikko's lips parted, and Mikael felt a cool rubbery object probing at his teeth, touching his tongue in a semblance of intimacy. The artificial tongue was dry, and smooth, and overly forceful. There was only so much he could take of this. He gently pulled away.

"I may not exactly feel sexual desire any longer but I do indeed _remember_ ," Mikko said. He reached out and smoothed Mikael's hair back. "If this is the last memory I have of you, let me not lose it. I want to keep this as long as I can, to know that you did not reject me, that you wanted me…."

"Of course I do. I've loved you for so long, but I didn't think I'd ever...it was just wrong, I wasn't supposed to feel that for you. You're so much older than me, and kind of my boss, and it was enough just playing at your side. And now I won't ever get to do that again."

"I didn't think I'd get to tell you either. By the time I could have said anything, I was… _this_ , inorganic, sterile, nonfunctional in the ways you'd want, but at least we could play hockey together. And I know, even if...when...I wake up again, I won't be able to play with you. My career as a hockey player is over. If I can even go out in public again. I don't know what I will become."

"I don't know what we're going to do without you. What I'm going to do without you."

"I can't help you with the team. When I wake, one of the first things I'm going to do is ask for you, either to visit or to call you up and hear your voice again. They'll let me. You're one of the things that keeps me bonded to this organic Earth, that reminds me of what it is to be alive. I live." Mikko reached out again and gathered Mikael into an embrace. "And as long as I live, I will love you. I am sorry it had to be this way."

Mikael returned the hug, sobbing. "I'll wait for that call. And you will make that call."

"All my hope is in it," Mikko replied. "Once we have held each other enough, you will do one last thing for me."

"What's that, Mikko?"

"Take off my gown and lay me down on the table. Kiss me one last time. There's a sequence of presses to my front teeth—five times in quick succession—that will activate my sleep mode. I wanted you to be the last thing I saw here."

Mikael let go of his beloved's embrace, and gently removed his hospital gown. He eased Mikko flat onto the table, and kissed him, making the quick presses with his tongue. Mikko smiled as his eyelids closed and all movement ceased.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to hotcrosbuns for the beta.
> 
> The inspiration for this fic came to me during an aimless post-work drive, listening to Radio K playing "Subterraneans" from David Bowie's 1977 album _Low_. The title is a misheard lyric from that song. Additional robotic inspiration was derived from the video for Bjork's "All is Full of Love."


End file.
